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Extensive research supports the claim that student-instructor interaction is an essential element of successful online teaching. It is less clear, however, whether teaching presence is discipline-specific, or how it may be affected by the personal and professional background of individual instructors. This article describes the quantitative portion of a mixed methods study to analyze patterns of commenting behaviours in a graduate-level, online nursing course. Following the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000), we compare experienced and inexperienced instructors, and specifically focus on how teaching presence evolved over a fifteen-week course. Our findings indicate that teaching experience affects the types and density (number per post) of comments used by teachers. Experience played a role in how density and overall level of activity evolved as the semester progressed. No differences in teaching presence emerged when comparing instructions for each assignment, but there were differences when comparing instructions to teacher posts. [The publication year on the pdf is incorrect, the correct year is 2022.]

The role of teaching presence in online courses has received significant attention within the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework since Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, and Archer (2001) proposed a set of categories of teaching presence and a tool to assess them. However, there has been limited research addressing whether the instrument proposed by Anderson et al. can adequately capture differences in teaching presence between disciplines. This article describes a qualitatively driven, mixed-methods study to analyze how the teaching philosophy that permeated a graduate-level online nursing course determined the role of teaching presence in the course. The analysis resulted in a revised version of the original CoI taxonomy informed by the disciplinary underpinnings of the instructors' teaching philosophy in order to better capture teaching presence in this course. The study has important implications for online teaching beyond the discipline of nursing, as it demonstrates how disciplinary factors may influence teaching practices.

Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of the digital age. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility. At the same time, digital technologies rely on hardware that has short life expectancy. The radical obsolescence of this new digital register raises a number of important questions. How are we going to prevent the fragile memories of contemporary digital cultures from receding into oblivion? This essay answers this question by looking at one of the institutions in which the problems associated with digital fragility are most especially felt, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and by exploring the ontological displacements that digital objects are operating at the heart of the museum.

Using the 2.4-million-word written Spanish subsection of the Corpus of Utah Dual Language Immersion, collected from a large-scale standardized writing assessment of K-12 Spanish second language (L2) students, this study focuses on lexical complexity as operationalized by three measures: lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The study goes beyond most previous work on lexical complexity by investigating the effect of task type on all three measures of lexical complexity. Patterns in variation are identified across proficiency levels and between task types. Results show that all three measures increase at each proficiency score between Novice High and Advanced, except at Intermediate Mid where scores dip or flatten. Diversity and sophistication are both shown to increase rapidly after this mid-point, indicating that a broad and deep lexical repertoire is a key feature of more advanced proficiency levels. Results for the effect of task indicate that text genre impacts learners' lexical density, while tasks that are more complex elicit higher lexical sophistication.

Dual language immersion (DLI) as an alternative model to monolingual English-medium education has continued to expand rapidly over the past decade. As this model continues to grow across the United States, stakeholders look to research to demonstrate sustainability and scalability of dual language programs. Drawing on 224 schools, the statewide study reported in this article investigated whether students' growth in a non-English DLI partner language sustained into the secondary level, to what degree students met performance benchmarks for these partner languages, and whether targeted outcomes were attained during program expansion. The longitudinal analysis of assessment data shows that middle school students performed at Intermediate Mid to High levels on the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency scale in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and that a segment of students raised their performance levels from 8th to 9th grade. Furthermore, a considerable portion of DLI students in French and Spanish dual language programs reached the Advanced level in 9th grade. Finally, 3rd- and 4th-grade data show that targeted performance outcomes held from one testing year to another, 4 years later, and after a substantial increase in enrollments. The article concludes with a discussion of curricular and policy implications.

Copyright of Grafica: Journal of Graphic Design / Documents de Disseny Gràfic is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Universum is the property of Instituto de Estudios Humanisticos Juan Ignacio Molina, Universidad de Talca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There is a significant world-wide apprehension concerning perceived deficiencies in university students' performance and a resulting decrease of knowledge level and competency development. This paper analyses the benefits of using a portfolio as a means of evaluating student progress and the beliefs from which students draw their learning and motivation, a key issue for the incorporation of former curricular elements into the European Space for Higher Education consolidation process. Two studies conducted at two universities in Spain to explore students' opinions of portfolio use surprisingly revealed that students found effort and daily work as the main beneficial aspects for their learning and motivation. Successful replication of this study in diverse contexts would imply that portfolio implementation can be a powerful instrument to empower students' motivation to learn. Other results related to portfolio use will also be discussed. (Contains 5 tables.)

This article briefly reviews the social, political, and economic context that explains the present status of elementary language education in the United States and addresses the challenges identified by recent reports on the state of language education in the United States. Different curricular models of world language education--exploratory, sequential, and immersion--are discussed in regard to their ability to meet the need, expressed by the profession, to provide universal access to language education and produce graduates who have advanced levels of language proficiency. The article argues that in order to be successful, elementary programs have to be built with support and input from a variety of stakeholders, with careful consideration of the financial and human resources needed and with long-term articulation plans. A state-supported immersion program is used to illustrate how the integration of all these factors can lead to successful and scalable programs.

The assessment of dual language immersion (DLI) students' proficiency in the partner language plays a key role in program evaluation. This article reports findings from a large-scale study, drawing on cross-sectional assessment data from 73 schools and longitudinal data from 25 schools. Students were tested in the interpretive (listening and reading) and interpersonal (listening/speaking) modes of communication, using the ACTFL Assessment of Proficiency Towards Performance in Languages. The cross-sectional analysis shows that French and Spanish students performed at Intermediate Low across skills in fourth or fifth grade and Intermediate Mid in sixth grade. Sixth-grade Chinese DLI students attained near Intermediate Mid in listening and Novice High to Intermediate Low in reading and speaking. Across languages, students achieved the highest ratings in listening and, overall, performed more strongly in listening and reading than speaking. A regression analysis of students' change scores over time revealed significant progress in nearly all tested skills and languages. Baseline scores and partner language (Chinese, French, or Spanish) accounted for significant variation in growth rates; between-school differences were found not to be significant. The article discusses implications for assessment instruments and DLI policy and also addresses some instructional implications.

This chapter describes a study of a blended language course that combines face-to-face (F2F) instructional time with an online component. The purpose of the study is to understand how teachers and students exploit the complementarity of the two delivery formats to improve the learning experience. The study first examines how the presence of an online component affects the F2F portion of the course by comparing it to a corresponding section of the same course taught entirely F2F. The findings of this first part of the study show major differences between the two delivery formats regarding teaching strategies and teaching presence. The second part of the study uses LMS data to analyze student participation in the online component of the blended course. Data were gathered to measure active participation, passive participation and continuity. The results show that online behaviors distinguish less successful students from more successful ones, and that there is a strong correlation between low levels of online participation and low grades in the course. Continuity proved to be the strongest predictor variable for success in the course. The results have important implications for course design and the use of learning analytics for the early identification of at-risk students.

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an “objecti- fication machine” that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful “objects” that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as “docile” or “unruly” objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduc- tion. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new “material sensibility” that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology.